Monthly Archives: March 2005

Laid off? Here’s the job for you.

Humor

The headline of this BBC story is: Experts to repair ‘faeces fossil’ and it just gets better from there.

Apparently it is a 1000-year-old bit of fossilized Viking excrement. And a University of Bradford student gets to restore it “to its former glory”. She says that she has “never done anything quite like this before”, but added that “it doesn’t smell and it’ certainly not squishy.”

Apparently it’s somewhat of a highlight for schoolchildren. “We’ve even had thank you letters saying ‘thank you for showing us the poo’.”

More on Asterisk

Technology, Uncategorized

Since I wrote about Asterisk, the Free Software PBX, a few days ago, I’ve decided to start tinkering with it. In a word, Asterisk is awesome. It has lots of features, and is free, too.

Asterisk lets you manage your phones. You can set up extensions, letting phones call each other. You can also set up routes out — connections to other offices, to the public telephone network (PSTN), or to other VOIP users. You can hook to the PSTN with either a $10 hardware device, or by using one of the many cheap VOIP providers, or whatever. And you can set up automatic call routing rules — for instance, you might route local calls over your local PSTN link, but fall back to a VOIP provider if your local link is in use.

Here are some links for Asterisk information:

  • The Asterisk wiki, an excellent resource
  • VOIP phones, hardware phones that take an Ethernet cable, or software phonse that run on a PC
  • VOIP service providers, listing some free IP-to-IP VOIP providers, as well as VOIP-to-PSTN and PSTN-to-VOIP companies.
    • FreeWorld Dialup is an excellent free VOIP-to-VOIP provider. They also have peering with many other VOIP networks; you can, for instance, call Vonage customers for free via FWD. FWD also has a free link to the PSTN for calling toll-free numbers in several countries.
    • VoipJet lets you call anywhere in the USA for 1.3 cents per minute, and LiveVOIP does the same for 1.2 cents per minute. With LiveVOIP, you can also purchase a phone number for incoming calls for $4 to $8 per month.
    • IPkall gives you a free local number in Washington state that forwards calls to your FWD account. There are some other companies that do similar things, too. Many also have very low rates on incoming toll-free calls.
  • Asterisk tips and tricks is a great page
  • Asterisk Handbook Project
  • Asterisk Documentation Project

Today’s Reading

General, Uncategorized

Two neat stories from Slashdot today:

First, an essay about fragmenting standards in the Linux world. I’m not certain yet if I think he’s on the right track, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Then, and this is really cool, an article about building your own PBX using old hardware for under $20. Basically, this can give you things like voicemail, multiple phone lines in your house, etc. Fascinating read, and I’m probably going to have to try it out :-) They are using the Asterisk project.

Next, I decided I would periodically report on the, ahem, exacting quality standards of what we see in some of the mainstream news outlets.

Today, CNN leads with Martha Stewart saying “it’s really wonderful to be back”, a story about how Jackson needed a bathroom break at his trial, the White House denying it targeted the Italian hostage, and how Clinton gave up his bed on a plane to George H. W. Bush. Real news factor: low.

MSNBC fares little better with some Pope watching, “Jackson’s private eye goes public” (whatever that means), the Jackson thing again (though sadly lacking in bathroom watching), and somebody surviving a drop from an overpass.

FOX leads off with “Boeing’s new boss talks scandal!”, a story on the “Jacko” defense, and after reading those two, I was too fed up to read any farther.

NPR leads off with “Syria vows pullback, large Hezbollah protests predicted”, a story about the new U.N. envoy, the Italian reaction to the hostage shooting, and Sony’s new CEO. Quite a bit farther down, I see a link to “‘Bring Out Your Dead’: Monty Python hits Broadway.” Hmm.

Running a Homeless Non-Profit

Uncategorized

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a fairly unique organization. It was originally created to be the legal entity that holds Debian‘s assets and can receive donations for it, though today it also has several other member projects. SPI is New York corporation, and a 501(c)3 not-for-profit.

I call it “homeless” because, like Debian, SPI has no physical home. There is no SPI office. Discussions about SPI are held online. Even the SPI board meetings and annual meetings are held online. This is a confusing concept to many people, but it makes perfect sense to us geeks. We have board members from the USA, Canada, UK, and Germany, at least. SPI maintains PO boxes for receiving mail, and that’s about as close as it gets to a real physical presence.

I’ve been on SPI’s board of directors for the last two years, and have been the SPI president since July. Sometimes this is a surreal experience.

Over its 8-year lifetime, SPI has had quite a few problems. A few years ago, SPI’s board had trouble meeting because so many members didn’t bother showing up that quorum wasn’t met. At one point, SPI was without both a president and a treasurer because both of them seemed to suddenly lose all interest in SPI, or returning e-mails. As you might imagine, most of my time on the board has been occupied, in one way or another, with trying to clean up things from the past while still keeping the present held together.

One main cause of this, and a problem still today, is lack of interest. Most of Debian’s developers are content to just ignore SPI, prefering to code instead of worry about getting stuff from the PO box to the bank, preparing tax returns, and all the other annoying things that go along with running a non-profit. So we don’t have many volunteers to do these things. That means the people that do volunteer burn out. And, to date, there hasn’t been enough support to obtain paid help.

I’m sure this isn’t a problem unique to SPI. I suspect that many non-profit organizations have had trouble finding people to handle all the details of running the organization. Our church, for instance, sometimes has trouble finding enough people to work on maintaining the building.

I wonder if being “homeless” hurts us, because it’s easier to give up on a task when there’s nobody looking at you in the face wondering why it’s not done.

So, I’d like to end with two questions:

How do you think SPI could get more people interested in helping out? Or do you think that we have a different problem entirely?